Muscle Memory
by theysay
Summary: Her body ceases to be her ally and instead becomes collateral. Post-Aliyah, Ziva reflects on how her past led her here. Vague spoilers Seasons 3 through 7.


Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS or any part of it. Hence writing here and not on a CBS set.

Vague tags and spoilers seasons 3 through 7. Many thanks to Cricket Songs for beta-ing.

* * *

_There are different sorts of knowledge, different ways of knowing things._

_She has known this since she was five years old. _Chaînés, fouettés jetés, arabesques en pointe._ (Her French is better than her English.) She remembers the exhilaration of dance classes, the fierce triumph of her first _fouetté en tournant_ on stage, and then the disappointment in failing to locate her father's face in the crowd. Nevertheless she excelled, and has never lost the sense of the gravity in her body. The acute awareness of each muscle and tendon linking together, locking and uncoiling; the instinctive grasp of her surroundings. She knows where her partner is in relation to her, senses each object and body in the space surrounding her, and her body is already working out how best to avoid them, to utilise them, to overpower them, almost before her eyes are done focusing._

_So now, when she enters a crime scene or a chase, when she goes for her pre-dawn runs, when she fights, it is this she is feeling. It is this that she knows. The push-pull gravity between her and the world. The grace and struggle in the physical connection between all things._

.

Here, now, her body ceases to be her ally and instead becomes collateral.

.

_Until Tali died she had not realised that grief is a physical thing that latches savage claws into you. She had lost fights before then, but nothing had winded her and made her knees buckle and made her want to scream and scream and scream until she saw her sister fall without the chance to run a single step or make a single sound._

_From that time she understood that it was not enough to be able to fight or run, to protect your body. That no matter how fast or far you run there are some things you cannot escape. So she learnt to be hard when she had to be, to be flippant and teasing when it did not matter, when she could get away with it. To always remain just outside of reach, because if they could not touch you, they could not hurt you._

_Somewhere below this, in a shadowy, dark place behind her ribs, is a wordless knowledge that the grief lurks there still. Quiet and private, and almost inaccessible, because, after all, she does not like to dwell on such things._

.

For the first time she is working as intently as she can against her own physicality. It is her flesh and bone that compromise her. The blood which pools then stains in a rust-hued plaid. Joints which will not let her forget how smoothly and naturally they can sit; so that beyond the pain lies a deeper fear that the pain might stop and that when it does it might be too late. And then she will never run or dance or_ stand _again.

.

_She remembers Tony's lips and hands as though they have been embossed onto her skin. She feels them, so sure and confident at her waist, untying the sash of a dress as though they have done this a thousand times before. Her hips and the flat of her belly tell her precisely how _his_ feel against them._

_And sometimes when she silently stalks up behind him at his desk, while he is surfing the net for something that is most definitely not work-related, she wonders that he does not seem to feel the physical tug of her body as it nears his. As she does his._

_._

_She half believes she can feel changes in his body temperature. She is open to things she cannot explain and includes this strange hypersensitivity amongst them. Mostly though it is mere observation. There is no need for a sixth sense when one fully utilises the five they are given and her whole life has trained her to do this._

_Of course she notices the way he looks at her, the gazes at odd moments. Lingering desire and his _protectiveness_._

_And it thrills her, because of all the things she has tried and done, she has never been _that_ girl. The one who needs shielding and comforting. And despite its absurdity, its unecessariness, she _wants_ it. _Oh she wants it_._

_._

When she can not stand she feels her mental battle play out in her limbs. Her senseless hope and never-spoken fear and the pain which punctures every reality she has ever known and threatens to override them all into oblivion. She feels it in the tremors that ripple her calves and in the fight between her head and her fury when she tries to make a fist of broken hand.

.

Nothing is inevitable_, she said once, and she must believe it. Because if things could not be different then she is fighting for nothing, for dreams doomed to be fruitless._

_Yet, for herself, it would be easier to think, _it could not be any other way_. She would like to, so much it aches. Because if things are not inevitable then maybe she did not have to live this life and carry out the acts that she has. She might have turned her back and said _No. No, I do not want this. No, I will not do this._ Refused the violence which marks out her place in the world with police chalk and tape. It is possible that she might have been some other woman, some diplomat, prima ballerina, doctor. Or maybe, somewhere, somehow, a mother, a lover who understands the body only as pleasure and comfort. Not as weapon, as bringer of pain, as threat. And sometimes she wants so desperately to be that woman. To have a family that can promise love and safety, rather than loyalty and duty and death. And even the possibility that she could have had these things, in some other life or world, is almost too much to bear._

_._

There is too much time alone, unmoving.

.

_But other days all her training comes to her, and she knows, she _knows_ that in any situation, against any opponent, there is a moment of opportunity, because no one is flawless, and that if you look for it, it is there. Nothing is inevitable. Every encounter is open. There is always a chance. There is always a choice._

_._

She does not believe in penance because she does not believe it is possible for anything to redeem her. Nevertheless, it is justified. She is terrified and agonised and defiant, and she is furious at the absurd destructiveness of their intentions, but she cannot be angry at what is done to her. Not because she believes they have any right to hurt her so – she has not lost her mind completely – but because it is not so much worse than what she has done. Because anyone who lives their life as an agent of pain and death, whatever their intentions, must expect death to come for his dues, and probably sooner.

She does not intend to survive.

.

_She has known crime scenes from every angle. It has been a dance and a courtship, and she has played one role then another. She is appalled that she cannot always tell the difference. She does not suffer from any illusions that victim and aggressor are the same, but she has practised as both for long enough to know that they can say the same thing. That this is a fucked-up truth of the world. That we all offer different reasons but mostly we do the same things._

_Operative. Perpetrator. Target. Victim._

_._

So, now. Now she cannot move her arms and her head is light and dazed from lack of water.

Her mind always knew that no one is infallible, but it is only now that her body knows it too.

It hurts less when she is not also feeling the loss of a certainty that won her fights and awards and a place in the world. When she does not recall the pleasure another body could bring; when her beauty seemed both blessing and curse. It is the curse that is made explicit now, but she is working to forget her own appearance.

Obligingly her body changes shape. Her ribs, which bloom black blue green purple, begin to cast their own shadows. Her wrists and ankles thin until they hang frail as new growth on trees.

Her monthly bleeding ceases. Now she bleeds much more frequently.

.

_She feels the weight of her beauty. A blessing that confers a duty. Sometimes she thinks of it as a sort of side-effect of her condition. Like the camouflage natural to wild animals, or else an attribute like the bright colours of certain carnivorous plants._

Her condition:_ she supposes this is a way of thinking about the things that happen to her and around her (the things she does). Because she is bereaved to say that her close familiarity with pain comes from having dealt it, as much as suffered it._

_Her profession sits upon her like an illness she was born with._

_Sometimes she is angry at the stupidity of people who think there is something exciting or glamourous or sexy about killing. This is the deception of beauty. It misleads and waylays. It is how she understands that she is what she does. How she understands that beauty is corrupt. Because she is beautiful and she did ugly things that bore no relation to lips or hair or figure._

_She will never be the sort of woman who feels a need to compensate for her beauty; she understands (in her father's cool, calculating gaze) that it is just another weapon in her arsenal. And because it came so naturally, like her athleticism and grace, her drive and memory and quick observations, she counts it amongst the things which committed _(doomed)_ her to the life she led. Not a determining factor, but merely another symptom of some curse in the blood that marked her out as the perfect assassin before she had taken her first breath._

_And in a wordless, unspeakable way, she has come to believe that she is cursed. How else to account for so much damage done?_

_._

If her body was once a weapon, it has since been revealed to be as pliable and predictable as any other. Like any instrument, you pluck a string or strike a key and a note will sound. She is too disorientated to tell if she is becoming more discordant over time, or if some song is shaping from her agony.

She is not the damsel in distress, merely human like everyone else. Fallible. Incredibly fragile. Afraid.

.

_She is not a machine, and is grateful for those who remember this. To them she feels herself to be more than an implement of her country, her father, enforcing another's will._

_In Washington she finds respite, freedom. Suddenly she finds herself with more to lose than she knew it was possible to have. And so comes to find herself haunted by her past (which is never past at all, because doesn't she carry it with her in her body, in her scars, her training and reflexes, in the blood she has washed from her skin that was not hers)._

_._

She is unlearning herself. To survive what happens to her body she must escape it. To escape it she must reject its truth; the truth is that her body is dying as it has lived, following the fatal logic of the damage it has trailed.

Dismiss this truth. It is unimportant as she is unimportant. She is getting over herself. She is leaving her skin.

.

_She feels guilt as a stain below her skin. Beneath the clean toned lines of her arms, legs, waist, it sits like spilt oil, cold and hard and metallic. Marring everything, marring her_._ And if it is invisible in most lights, it also blocks feeling. Ensures that any momentary joy she might have is just that: temporary, always ready to slide off. If there is a slickness to her actions, to the effortless way she handles a stand-off, to the composed, neutral gaze she adopts when facing a threat, then that is only further proof that her body is so trained to damage that it reflects off, opalescent and shining and utterly, revoltingly internalised. Because even if she is fighting for the _right_ side, she is not _good_. She has done terrible things and there is a chorus of cringing and breaking voices that echo when it is quiet and from them she cannot distinguish her own. She has never been a sadist, but it no longer seems to matter. She does not even remember all their names. She was taught that to have control is to have dignity, but the profanity of taking this away from others only strikes her now. The horror of it scalds her._

.

At times she can dance in her head and not feel it in her body at all. At times she cannot feel her body at all.

.

_She sees it then. That there is some excess of violence held within her body, which cannot be purged or ignored. It dictates her actions and fate, and it throws around her weight like a wave bearing down on something very small._

_._

And here is the miracle.

As her muscle memory fades her past is wiped clean. If she does not remember how to kill – how it feels to kill – then maybe she is no longer a killer. There is a lightness in this, and then a calmness.

There comes a clarity in the pain and an innocence to her suffering which should not be possible, and she discovers she is ready to die.

.

And then he comes and asks her, _Can you fight?_ and she is betrayed by her body once more, which kicks to life only to prove itself crippled. Her memory severed mind from matter. It is impossible to move through the world without a physical form.

.

_After everything, what she remembers is the feel of floor hard against her toes as she spun on a stage more than two decades past, the reassuring gravity pulling her down, and the flow of strength through legs and core and neck, the fluidity and control._

_._

So when asked, later, later, _Have you ever killed anyone?_, her answer does not feel entirely like a lie.

She came home from the desert with a new body and if it looks much like the old one, well, then you were never really looking.

.

But sometimes, somewhere behind or through this, within this, she carries the ghost of a woman she sacrificed so that she might exist as she does now, and she can almost remember watching her die.

He thought that by rescuing her, he resurrected her, but she knows better. The dead do not come back to life. Instead, we carry our dead with us and within us. And when she has no choice she allows this ghost to possess her, and to kill for her, or to kill for others. She releases the death within her, tentative and hopeless as the lover of a criminal, each time hoping she is not to be witness, accomplice, culpable.

All the while knowing that as she does so the damage done to that body is slowing imprinting onto hers.

* * *

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